“Where’s your farm?” I asked. I’d roamed these hills as a boy and knew them like the back of my hand. Since she’d walked into town, it couldn’t be far, and I considered which properties lay in this direction. She didn’t really seem to know how to answer me; she just vaguely pointed up ahead along the dusty trail.
When I saw the river rock chimney up ahead, I was surprised. “Wait, you’re living at the Meteor Crater?” I demanded. That wasn’t really its name, but that’s what we’d called it growing up, as it had been abandoned for being extremely unlucky during Llykhe’s somewhat regular meteor storms—not actually unlucky, of course, just a fluke in terrain that made it more prone to being struck.
She gave me the haughtiest of looks over her shoulder. “It’s called Hearth and Haven now, thank you very much.” She had her hackles raised, as if I’d deeply offended her by calling her home a crater. Maybe she was scared too, because a place with a name like that couldn’t be safe, could it? Not on a planet where meteors striking were a regular occurrence.
“Sure,” I agreed, but I reserved judgment until after I’d seen the place. Who had been so crazy as to buy it? Had no one warned the human what a bad spot this property was? I felt bad for her, but she clearly took pride in owning it.
It was much worse than I expected. Much worse. I recalled the nearly falling-down stone cottage and the ancient barn. They’d been abandoned when I was a child and looked that way then; now they looked worse. Sure, someone had given the front door a new lick of paint, and I could see some rudimentary roof repairs, but that was all that had been fixed. The fences were broken, the trellis with vines of Aderian grapes listing and crooked, and the garden patch beside the house completely overgrown. What the blazing stars had been going on out here?
“Uh, yeah,” Mariska began to stutter as I followed her into the farmyard. “The pressing machine is in there, as well as my harvest and last year’s first attempt at wine.” She eyed her overgrown cottage with the twisted chimney. “Do you want to come in for a drink first?” She said it as if the last thing she wanted was for me to come inside her home. Uneasily shifting on her boots, I pointed at the barn with a nod, and she led the way with obvious relief.
Inside the barn, my horror only grew. What had my people been thinking—dumping a helpless human on a farm without proper instruction? Or had she been too dense to understand what she needed to do to run a place like this?
Stacks upon stacks of crates were piled together with her harvest, which should have been going into the broken pressing machine right away for processing. Massive barrels filled the back of the barn with last year’s wine—improperly stored andlacking the temperature control needed for proper fermentation, simply left haphazardly all over the place. It didn’t appear that she had sold any of it, and there was hardly any space or barrels left for this new batch.
Rust and dust coated everything, and a hole in the roof here was going to be disastrous when winter came. She wasn’t just in need of a mechanic to fix her pressing machine; she clearly needed more structural aid around the farm. There was no way she could make this place turn a profit in its current state.
I turned toward her to eye her straight spine and pinched mouth, wondering how I could possibly tell her that fixing the pressing machine was the least of her worries. “How did you end up here?” I asked instead.
Chapter 3
Mariska
“How did you end up here?” An innocent sort of question on its own, but it felt like judgment anyway. Damn it, I’d picked him because he was rude and didn’t seem to have that uncanny ability to sense what I was feeling. That question was definitely the prying kind, and I really didn’t want to answer. He stared at me from his tall height, his black eyes fathomless black mirrors I could read nothing in. That long braid of his, dangling over one brawny shoulder, was a better focus point. It had intriguing bands of gold at intervals and looked so neat and smooth it had to be soft to the touch. Like silk.
“Fine,” Jeltom said, a gruff edge to his voice. “Don’t tell me. We all have secrets, even on Aderia.” He turned his back to me, and I drew in a relieved breath. So he wasn’t going to continue that line of questioning, good. See, I knew I’d liked him for a reason; it just got a hell of a lot more complicated when he was so damn appealing to look at. I shuffled back a few steps, uncertain what to do with myself.
This whole ordeal had already eaten up so much of my time, and I had a list of chores a mile long waiting for me. If he didn’t need me here… Of course, he did have questions related to the job—starting with: “Where are your tools?” I should have realized he’d want to use what I had on hand; he’d come here wearing only the clothes on his back. It was a very nice back, but with elbow grease alone, the pressing machine wouldn’t be fixed. I had plenty of that myself, and I hadn’t made a difference.
Silently, I went to the cabinet against one wall, barely reachable between the frustratingly stacked barrels of failed wine. Pulling it open, I hauled out the heavy toolbox and began dragging it his way. He met me halfway, bent at the knees, and effortlessly picked the heavy box up. I was pretty sure I heard a muffled sort of laugh—a husky little noise—but when I looked at his face in a mortified rush, he appeared deadly serious: not a muscle out of place, not so much as a sparkle in his mirror-smooth black eyes.
He plunked the toolbox down beside the pressing machine and opened it, then swore loudly. “These aren’t tools. Is this all you have?” I felt heat wash over me, climbing high in my cheeks. Okay, perhaps there was something to be said for the kind, polite Aderian empaths. Jeltom, he was definitely not being nice. Rude was what I’d bargained for, so I could hardly complain about getting exactly what I’d wanted now.
I’d used them yesterday to fix up one section of fence, but it was hard to keep up when there was just so much fence to deal with. They worked, even if they weren’t top-notch. “Fine. I already took a look, and I’ll need to get some things. Let me finish my inspection, and then I’ll walk back to town to get my own tools.” He was already out of the barn before I could agree or disagree. I trailed after him in confusion, wondering what else he needed to inspect.
My fences, as it turned out, and that shield generator I’d worried about, along with the crooked S-curve of my chimney and the ancient harvesting machine I had parked beneath a carport-like area on the side of the barn—were all scrutinized. He’d tssk and hum but say nothing else, while his frown deepened. I was a nervous wreck by the time he headed down the path back to town with a final nod of his head. Fuck, he didn’t pry withquestions, but damn if those eyes of his didn’t notice everything. I felt like he’d peered at me under a lens for hours. I needed a shower, and then I wanted to curl up under my blankets and hide for a few weeks.
How did my homestead look to his eyes? Abysmal, a failure? I knew the fences were bad, and I’d been working to fix a section every day ever since I got here. I’d focused on those furthest out, and even though I’d been at it for months already, it still felt like I hadn’t made a difference. Then there were the crooked vines, the rusty harvester, and… I knew the hole in the roof needed fixing, too, but I had no clue how to do that either.
It was very tempting to sit down on my porch and cry. I was going to lose this place; there was no way I could ever make it turn a profit. Then what? I’d have to go back to Ker and that dreary gray compound, or accept a job in an Aderian city, crammed together with a million empaths prying into my business. I struggled to breathe just thinking about it.
No! I rose resolutely and got back to work. No, there was no way I was going to let that happen. So I tackled some of the million chores waiting for me: weeding the vegetable patch, fixing another section of fence, scrubbing another mass of rust off the harvester so its moving parts could move freely. That’s what I was doing when Jeltom showed up again, even though I wouldn’t have blamed him if he’d declined the job after seeing the state of my poor farm.
He made a deep harrumphing noise to announce his presence. I waved at him but didn’t approach, and he didn’t seem to need me to. He ducked into the barn, and that was that. I noticed no tools or supplies on him, but that didn’t register until muchlater—when I was kneading dough for pastries and stirring a pot of simmering stew for the filling. He had gone for supplies, but where were they?
The barn… Had he put his toolbox down in it first, before he came to let me know he was back? Was that it? Turning the dial on my weird alien stove off, I washed my hands and dried them. Only one way to find out.
Chapter 4
Jeltom
I was still fuming when I made it all the way back into town and crashed through the door of the small cabin I was staying in. A shack was a better word, but it was all I wanted right now, all I needed. My tools clattered as I roughly threw them into my kit, my teeth clenched together so tightly that my jaw ached. Who in their right mind had decided to saddle one tiny human female with a farm as dismal as the one at Meteor Crater?
I knew it had been abandoned for a long time, probably owned by some government trust and tied up in all kinds of legislation. Aderians were terribly good at generating paperwork, for some reason. Clearly, this human had been given the farm as part of her sanctuary deal. Knowing the rules about that sort of thing better than most, because I’d relocated someone who needed sanctuary once or twice in my military career, I knew exactly how this must have gone down.
Mariska had applied for sanctuary on Llykhe, and some dusty old bureaucrat had gone down a list of possible properties to stow her on. Then someone had forgotten an inspection or two before signing off on the site, and now here she was. On a farm that, on paper, was perfectly fine, but in reality was a death trap that could never turn a profit. She’d been doomed to fail from the start, and I knew what the next step would be: shared housing in a city with others. And if she could not find a way to be a helpful part of society then, she’d be sent back where she came from. Nobody thought it ever came to that—the sensitiveempaths simply couldn’t believe we’d be that harsh—but we could be. Mariska had to fear that every moment of the day.
“I knew you’d take the job, cousin,” Avertom said from the open doorway to my temporary home. He leaned casually against the doorjamb and peered around my living quarters, curiosity dancing in his always-cheerful eyes. I lifted my hand and made a rude gesture, but that only made him laugh. I shoved more tools into a second bag, along with the more delicate hand scanner and chemical analyzer. I’d need those to do something about the failed first batch, nothing was not salvageable, not in my book. At least, when it came to wine. That farm, though? That was a very different story.
